1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of multi-user communications networks and more particularly to an awareness service for indicating the online status of users on the communications network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Networked communications systems have grown explosively in recent years. In many communications systems, such as instant messaging systems, an “awareness service” can be used, which is a system for displaying to a user the online status of other users logged into a network. Through an awareness service, a user can have a “buddy list” which, when activated, will display the online status of the other users defined in the buddy list. The user can then be “aware” of whether the other users are logged into the communications network, and can accordingly send messages or initiate other forms of communication with the other users. Awareness services can also be used with systems that share documents through document repositories, where a user can peruse the system for a document, and can immediately check whether the author of a particular document is online.
However, when a particular user is logged into an awareness service, the online status for the user is delivered to all interested recipients in exactly the same way irrespective of context or of any relationship between the users. For example, the awareness service may simply display, for a particular user, an availability message of “Available” to all parties subscribed to the service, once the user has logged on to the service. However, a user may wish to specify a different online status to different parties subscribing to the awareness service. A user could be in a meeting, such as an electronic meeting, and may wish, for example, to display an availability message of “Do Not Disturb” to other users of the awareness service not in the same meeting, while displaying an alternate availability message of “Available” to users which are also in the same meeting.
Current awareness services do not have the ability to set a different online status for a user with respect to varying groups of other users connected or subscribed to the awareness service. A user cannot therefore, publish varying online status messages to other users, based on any context, such as a collaborative context between the user and some group of other users.
It would be desirable therefore, to provide an awareness service where a user could publish a varying online status. It would further be desirable to provide an awarness service where the online status could depend on a collaborative context between the user and a group of other users subscribed to the awareness service, where the user could set and determine the collaborative context.